


Like an Arrow

by cloudycats



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Bend Time shenanigans, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-16
Updated: 2018-06-16
Packaged: 2019-05-24 03:37:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14946864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cloudycats/pseuds/cloudycats
Summary: “My Mark is not malfunctioning,” the Outsider says.Five times Corvo and Daud accidentally troll each other with time abilities, and one time it's completely intentional.





	Like an Arrow

**one –**

Havelock says, “We'll take them apart, piece – ”

Corvo takes the moment to give his recently acquired “gift” a dirty look, then quickly schools his expression back to attentive neutrality.

“ – by – ”

He rubs his forehead, drags his hand down his face, and valiantly resists the urge to break something. The Outsider's nose, preferably. It's partly Corvo's fault for being too shell-shocked to ask about the terms behind the Mark, but he would never have expected _this_ to be a side effect.

“ – piece....” Havelock trails off, giving him an odd look. Corvo sees the exact second he decides to shrug off Corvo's instantaneous change in position. He gets to keep seeing it for the next forty-five seconds. He knows it's forty-five seconds because that's the length of the first stanza of “The Drunken Whaler”, which Corvo finishes singing in his head before Havelock's voice manages to break in.

It's going to be a long briefing.

\---

**two –**

“You should go. This is Abbey business now,” Daud says to the guard by the interrogation room. He doesn't check to see that the man's left before heading inside.

An Overseer mask isn't the best disguise for dealing with the Watch, particularly since Burrows took over and gave the Abbey increased jurisdiction over law enforcement. It got him into Coldridge, though, where Lizzy Stride is being held, and it got him into this interrogation room, where it looks like one of Delilah's witches exploded in the chair. Void smoke writhes across the floor around her feet, lapping like the tide at her ankles. Daud climbs over the massive roots that cover the ground and stretch up the walls, heading for the raised area where the records of interrogations are kept. There's a rune there somewhere under the leaves, singing for his attention.

He turns the audiograph on and listens to the recording of the witch's interrogation while he brushes the plants aside in the corner of the room. It starts off in the standard manner, the interrogators asking questions, breaking a finger when they don't hear an answer, but then the witch starts screaming. Daud clasps the rune to his belt and eyes the bloodstains on the walls as he stands. Must have been a pleasant way to die, for witch and Watch all.

Better than the rats, at least. There's always that.

He banishes the gold ingots fallen from the broken safe into the Void. The Outsider has always been less than impressed by Daud's habit of using the infinite birthplace of all things as a portable storage unit, but he has yet to stop Daud from doing it. If it truly bothered him, he would. The audiograph clicks off while Daud skims the papers on the desk, looking for Lizzy Stride's name. And another name, too, though it's been several days since the last time that name visited this room.

Someone shouts outside. Daud looks up sharply, meeting the gaze of the guard who should have left. The guard who's staring at him with wide, terrified eyes, pistol off his belt but not pointed at Daud. Not yet.

“What is it?” the officer guarding the restricted wing asks from around the doorway, out of Daud's line of sight. “What happened?”

“He – the Overseer walked over the threshold, and then – he didn't move, I swear he didn't move, but then he was back there, and the audiograph was on – you heard it too, the last few seconds. That was _witchcraft_.”

What is the man on about? But he hears the other guard say, “Yeah, I heard it too.”

“It's the room,” Daud says, trying to sound like he knows what he's talking about. “It's close to the Void. Time moves strangely. I've seen it happen before with dead witches.”

Neither of the guards responds. Neither of the guards moves. The one he's looking at doesn't breathe. He glances at his hand – there's no dim glow through the back of the glove. He's not the one doing this. He'll work out who is later.

The guard jumps back. “You know what,” he says, voice high, “forget the Abbey, let's burn it.”

“We can't do that,” the other guard says, though he sounds desperately like he wants to agree.

“That's right, you can't,” Daud says. “I'm taking care of it. This isn't work the City Watch is suited for.”

The guard bristles. “This is Coldridge Prison. It isn't the Abbey. Overseers don't have power here. Get out. We'll decide what to do without your – ”

Daud's saber finds the second guard's neck while the first is still disintegrating into dark filaments. He tears the key to the restricted wing off the other man's belt before the body vanishes, lips pressed thin as he runs through names in his head. Lizzy Stride. Delilah. Then the idiot who nearly blew his cover in the most ridiculous manner possible.

\---

**three –**

The watchtower stops spinning, and Corvo releases his blink into empty air thirty feet off the ground, the platform he was aiming for nearly in arm's reach. On reflex, he blinks again. He staggers and grabs the railing when he reappears to keep from pitching off the suddenly rotating tower. Below him, a tallboy whirs to alertness, having caught sight of him while he was falling.

The Outsider has still refused to give Corvo a refund or to replace his current Mark with one that doesn't malfunction without the slightest warning. He grits his teeth and closes his fist, stopping time of his volition for once. The tallboy's explosive bolts hang in the air between them. He opens the whale oil panel, pulls out the tank, lobs it at the tallboy, and blinks onto a balcony a fair distance away.

Time resumes.

Twin explosions boom against the watchtower, another takes out the tallboy in a heap of flame and flying metal parts, and Corvo rolls his eyes and steps into the violet-lit room as the shouts go up.

“My Mark is not malfunctioning,” the Outsider says when Corvo glances pointedly at the chaos outside. The last word comes with an odd lilt that's partly amusement. He hasn't mentioned the matter again by the time he leaves, and Corvo pockets the rune from his shrine with ill grace.

He slams the door on his way out. It's barely audible over the alarms.

\---

**four –**

Daud has long known that he can extend his immunity to time-affecting abilities to people and objects he's physically interacting with. He has also long assumed that there is some limit to the mass of the object in question. If he's inside, his immunity doesn't apply to the entire building, and so on.

Clearly, the best time to find out he was wrong about this assumption is while he's piloting someone else's boat on the largest river in Dunwall at the busiest hour of the day.

He curses. Hurriedly, he cuts the _Undine_ 's engines and tries to turn them away from the nearest few of the tiny skiffs that dart like dragonflies across the water.

There's an unpleasant shriek of metal up ahead, conspicuous and alarming in the silence.

Daud counts to three, expression blank, then transverses onto the deck and grabs Lizzy's shoulder.

“Daud!” She stares around at her frozen gang for a moment, then makes a face that's half grimace and half smile. “You can stop time, too. Should've guessed.”

“It's not me,” Daud grates.

Her eyes sharpen. “We under attack?”

“No. But you might want to brace.”

He transverses with her into the cabin. She takes the relocation well, only glancing around long enough to ascertain where she is before looking out the window.

The boat rocks, so slight that it might only be a marginally rougher wave. A scream and a great deal of shouting belie that wish.

“Daud.” Lizzy's lips pull back into something that could almost pass for a grin. She doesn't say more. She doesn't need to.

Daud gets out of her cabin.

\---

**five –**

Corvo reaches the centerpiece of the old Rudshore Financial District uncontested. He's exhausted, feverish, his head pounding hard enough that his vision blurs at loud noises; he wouldn't willingly fight a City Watch patrol like this, let alone a gang of Marked assassins. He slips past them through the shadows, as fish or rats or hounds or humans, until he's perched on the second floor of Daud's office, listening to the tired voice of the man who killed Jessamine.

While Daud talks to his subordinate, Corvo rifles through his things. The words in Daud's journal seem to fly off the page, slipping out of his sight as he tries to read. He would give up the Empire for an hour-long nap, but Emily needs him more than he needs to live without a migraine. He drops the book on the bed, letting the pillows muffle the sound, and squeezes his eyes shut.

When he lets the light back in, it's quieter downstairs. Daud is talking still, apparently to the audiograph on the table, but the subordinate has gone. Corvo makes a quick sweep of his immediate surroundings. Daud and another of his assassins are the only living things around.

At any other time, he'd blink behind Daud and slit his throat before the assassin knew he was there. Right now, though, he just... can't.

He also doesn't have a weapon, which might factor into that decision somewhere.

The Heart murmurs, her voice the only sound that doesn't feel like shrapnel in his skull. _Paid assassin. Daud. The last thing the... Empress felt was his blade._

He's tired. He wants to see Emily safe. The Void can devour the rest for all he cares. Later, he promises, when Emily is secure on the throne and he's in any state to fight, he'll come for Daud, but there are more important things at stake. Like the key on Daud's desk.

Non-malfunctioning Mark. Of course, that's why a single glass door is an impassable barrier to his heretical god-given teleportation witchcraft. _Daud_ wouldn't need to steal a key to get through a glass door. He knows this because he heard two assassins talking about it not a few minutes earlier. Sight is a _distraction_ , they said. It certainly is when there's a pane of glass in the way.

He waits until Daud's back is turned to blink down and slip it off the ring. Unfortunately, the other assassin sees him and fires his wristbow. Corvo stops time, halting the projectile in the air, and makes for the door.

“ _You_ ,” Daud says into the stillness, the same way Corvo hears people pronounce “rats”.

Corvo stops by the door and turns. Daud is drawing his sword, taking his time about it. The other assassin doesn't move, arm still outstretched towards Corvo's previous position. The picture comes together. Corvo realizes what he's looking at, and he _growls_.

The other assassin splinters into fragments to reform on the second floor, looking out across the office. “Leave us,” Daud orders. “He's _mine_.”

The assassin only hesitates for a moment. And then it's just Corvo and the man who killed Jessamine and has spent the past week trying to do the same to Corvo. He's unarmed, drained of magic, woozy from poison and injury, and very seriously entertaining the idea of murdering Daud with his bare hands.

“I ran four people over with someone else's boat because of you,” Daud says. “I had to pay for the damages and the bribes to the Navy.”

When he invaded the Tower, Corvo threw a canister of whale oil into the paths of two tallboys as they were passing each other. Except the tallboys stopped, so the oil exploded between them, harmless and deafeningly loud. He has less than no sympathy. Antipathy, in fact. He assesses how much more magic he can use; the answer comes back as _enough_ , so he blinks behind Daud and tackles him.

It's not a long fight, and it ends predictably, with Corvo pinned to the wall by a sword through his left hand and an arm against his throat. Daud steps back, not even breathing hard. Corvo grabs the sword's hilt but doesn't try to pull it out for fear he'll do more damage.

Both of them are quiet. Daud watches him, searching. Corvo would feel like a rat splayed open on a table, but he doesn't have the energy to spare for fancy metaphors. All his focus is given to not blacking out.

He notices, though, when Daud turns his back and walks out. He starts to reach for the Mark to see where Daud is, but he chokes on the pain when his hand flexes. Carefully, slowly, he pulls the blade out, lets it thump onto the floorboards, and slumps down against the wall, bleeding hand cradled to his chest. He does black out for a while then. When he wakes up, the sky through the broken roof is tinting towards orange in the west.

His hand is swollen and either trapped in ice or being devoured by hagfish, but he has a place to be and he's breathing. He drags himself up and goes.

\---

**plus one –**

Daud doesn't consider himself a complicated man. He wanted to hurt Corvo. He hurt Corvo. That business is done with. When he shadows the former bodyguard out of Rudshore, it's with a different goal in mind. Corvo doesn't interest him, but he's invested too much into this Empress's survival to have her protector fail again.

Corvo can move not only while Daud's using his time stop ability, but also during the preparation stage of his transversal, which costs Daud no mana and the barest amount of concentration to hold for however long he feels like. If Corvo wasn't half-dead, that might have been an unpleasant surprise back in his office. However, he was half-dead, so it earns the chance to be a rather pleasant surprise instead. It means Daud has been inconveniencing Corvo over the past week much more than the inverse, since it turns out that Corvo's pathetic excuse for a transversal doesn't have that planning stage.

Honestly, having to come up to his office to steal a _key_. Daud only keeps the thing around for his Whalers who can't transverse.

He stops time when Corvo's trying to jump onto the corpse train, trapping the vehicle in place, and again when Corvo's bumbling past the guards holding the district's barricades. At the Hound Pits Pub, Daud maintains it for seven minutes, starting from when Corvo steps out into daylight and ending when he's choked out every guard and fired a bullet at every tallboy's whale oil pack. He unclenches his fist, and every guard in the area drops simultaneously as explosions blast the tallboys apart.

It's natural for the Outsider's Marked to have an unconquerable advantage over a common Watch officer. This might be a bit much, though. If Daud could pull off this trick with even a single Whaler, they'd be more of a menace to the city than they already are. Assassinating the Empress would have been a joke. A tasteless joke with a worse punchline, admittedly, but it could have ended without Corvo being framed.

On the other hand, that could mean Corvo would have worked willingly with Burrows to search for the Empress's murderer. It really would have been a very bad joke.

Daud can't follow when Corvo leaves for Kingsparrow Island. He guesses how long the commute will take, and once the upper end of the estimate hits Daud closes his fist and and spends the next thirty minutes sitting motionless on the edge of the tower that houses Emily's room. The one downside to this, really, is that it's the most boring activity imaginable. He counts out eighteen hundred sheep, then lets the sea wind start to blow again.

If Corvo couldn't rescue Emily after that, he's beyond help. Daud gets up, brushes himself off, and summons a Whaler. “Give the word to pack up,” he says. “We need to be out of Rudshore when the bells ring for the Empress's return.”

The Whaler doesn't acknowledge the order. Daud takes in the frozen waves below and imagines throwing Corvo into them. It's a wish that keeps him going through the next four decades.


End file.
